International Cinema Festival of India

There’s loads of money to be made in schooling, argues Bob Bowdon, henceforth merely if you cut away the unprofitable bits, like practiced teachers. In his documentary “The Cartel,” Bowdon, a New Jersey TV news reporter, turns the camera on the monumental corruption and mismanagement that has led his state to spend more than any other on its students but with shoddy results. As $400,000 is spent per classroom, but reading proficiency is just 39% (and math at 40%), the crisis is clear, which doesn’t mean it’s not controversial.

Here are two major factions in Bowdon’s movie — the villains are pretty clearly the Jersey teachers union and school board who funnel 90 cents of every dollar away from teachers’ salaries and toward incidentals, including six-figure salaries for school administrators. On the other side are the supporters of charter schools — private schools that can work beyond the authority of what Bowdon calls The Cartel. Bowdon makes much of the fact that it’s pretty much impossible for an instructor to be fired, a safety net that does little to encourage hard work in those teachers who understand they have a vocation regardless of how many of the three Rs they instruct — if any.

“The film examines lots of individual aspects of public teaching, tenure, financing, patronage drops, subversion –meaning thieving — vouchers and charter schools,” says Bowdon. “The idiom education documentary might sound to some like dull squared, but in fact the movie itself betrays an ardent passion for the predicament of particularly inner-city children.”

Bowdon’s docudrama started touring the festival circuit in summer of 2009 and made its theatrical debut in April 2010. Hopefully it will get a rise, and not be overshadowed, by the more recently released documentary “Waiting for Superman,” by “An Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim. Bowdon says the documentaries can be seen as companion pieces: his focusing on public policy and Guggenheim’s taking the human-interest slant. “My film is the left-brained version, more analytical,” Bowdon says, “‘Waiting for Superman’ is more the right-brained treatment.”

The left-brained tactic means arguments that follow the economics — money misspent, opportunities wasted. Although he calls it left-brained, still “The Cartel” reaches some disheartening moments of emotion. A girl’s tears upon hearing that she wasn’t selected to attend a charter school, that she’s stuck in her public school, illustrate the failure of a system as well as Bowdon’s charts and interviews.

It’s hard to observe a movie about corruption in Jersey and not think of the mob, but it’s also unambiguous that this is a national predicament seen through a tight lens. Any watcher will acknowledge the failings of their own state’s education system and the struggle for control. Bowdon comes out in favor of the charter school plan, of taxpayers being able to choose their own schools, to get out from under the state’s control. But “The Cartel” also shows us how difficult it’s going to be to get that control back from those who’ve found it so profitable.

Village Voice story of The Cartel, a film by Bob Bowdon.